OpenAI and Meta sued over alleged copyright infringement by AI

Comedian Sarah Silverman and authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey have filed lawsuits against OpenAI and Meta, claiming their works were used without permission to train AI models. The lawsuits allege that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA were trained on datasets acquired from ‘shadow library’ websites containing the authors’ copyrighted books.

In the lawsuit against OpenAI, the plaintiffs claim that ChatGPT, when prompted, can summarise their books without their permission, thus violating their copyrights. They also argued that the chatbot fails to include any of the copyright management information that they included in their published works. In the lawsuit against Meta, the plaintiffs claim that their books were included in the databases that Meta used to train its LLaMA models.

The plaintiffs seek statutory damages, restitution of profits, and other forms of compensation. Plaintiffs’ lawyers Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick claim that these lawsuits raise concerns about the unauthorised use of copyrighted material in AI models.